Boffo Socko Publishing

Tag: MediaWiki

Thank you everyone!

For those who attended yesterday’s The Garden and the Stream IndieWebCamp session, thank you for participating! I honestly only expected 4 or 5 wiki fans to show up, so I was overwhelmed with the crowd that magically appeared from across multiple countries and timezones.

I’ve heard from many–both during the session and privately after–that it was a fantastic and wide-ranging conversation. (I never suspected memory palaces or my favorite 13th century Franciscan tertiary to be topics of discussion.) Several have suggested we host not only a continuation of the session, but that they’d be interested in other pop-up IndieWebCamp sessions. If you’re interested in future follow ups or sessions shoot me a quick email (you can find it on my home page) and I’ll be sure you get an invite. You can also follow future events via events.indieweb.org or find them in the IndieWeb’s weekly newsletter that is emailed out every Friday afternoon.

Our session went on far longer than I ever could have anticipated and I suspect we could have easily gone all day and still not touched on a fraction of all the topics we all outlined. Special thanks to the larger majority of those who were interested enough and had the free time to stay well past the hour mark and on to the end. I will say it’s nice to be able to cover so much ground and so many ideas without the threat of 5 more sessions following you.

Video and Notes

If you write up any notes or posts about the session, do add a link to them in the IndieWebCamp Pop-Ups page under blog posts/articles or photos. If you can’t log into the wiki (with your own website), feel free to ping me with the URL and I’ll add them for you.

I’ll try to write up an organizer’s post-mortem with a few ideas about doing future sessions for others to consider. I hope to rewatch the session myself and add to the growing list of notes and thoughts about it.

Creators Challenge

Because this was just a single IndieWebCamp-style discussion session and we hadn’t specifically planned a traditional creator’s day or hack day, I did want to throw out a small challenge to those who either attended or who are interested in participating.

For most, the IndieWeb is more about creating something than just talking about it. So in that spirit, I’ll challenge everyone to spend a few hours today/tomorrow or sometime this week and create something on your website or wiki related to the session. It can be a summary of ideas, a blog post about wikis (or anything you like really), a small change you’ve always wanted on your site (a CSS improvement, adding bi-directional links to your wiki, Webmention support, etc.), or anything else you might have found interesting from the conversation. The best part is that you can choose what you create on your own site! Make something you’ll use or appreciate. Have fun!

My personal plan for the challenge is to continue some work to my TiddlyWiki to support bi-directional links using TiddlyBlink. I might also take a crack at doing some design and building work to show some incoming webmentions on my TiddlyWiki. (If anyone is interested in test-driving Mike Caulfield’s implementation of Wikity on WordPress in conjunction with Webmention, I could be game for that too!)

Once you’ve made your creation, post a link to your article or notes or make a quick 2-3 minute demo video of the new feature or write up a post about it and add them to the IndieWeb wiki page for Pop-up Session Demos. Again if you can’t log into the wiki with your own website yet, drop me a note and I’ll add them for you or you can ask for help on how to do it in the IndieWeb chat.

Thanks again everyone! I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

There has been some sporadic conversation about doing impromptu IndieWebCamp sessions and thus far we’ve yet to organize one. Given our physical distancing and the dearth of bigger IndieWebCamps, I thought I would propose this single topic stand alone camp session to get something rolling. I’d invite others to propose and schedule others in the future.

This is an online only event. We will provide a Zoom video conference link 30 minutes before the session here and in the IndieWeb chat.

Session Topic

We’ll be discussing and brainstorming ideas related to wikis and the IndieWeb, user interfaces, functionalities, examples of wikis and how they differ from blogs and other social media interfaces, and everyones’ ideas surrounding these. Bring your ideas and let’s discuss.

This is just a single one hour IndieWebCamp-like session (though we have the option to go over a bit since there isn’t a session following us) where we’ll brainstorm and discuss a particular topic. Hopefully the weekend time will be convenient for a wide range of people in Europe and North America who have previously shown interest in the topic. Everyone is welcome to attend.

I ran across Roam Research in late 2019, and in exploring TiddlyWiki lately I’m seeing a lot about people adding Roam-based functionality to TW5. What I’m not seeing is any conversation about how the same sort of backlinking could be done in MediaWiki.

WikiBookmarks is a MediaWiki extension which lets you to manage shared bookmark lists inside a Wiki article. The extension is written by Vitaliy Filippov and is distributed under the terms of GNU GPL license version 3 or later. Also, here is a link to extension homepage.

I’ve been working on making some significant back-end tweaks to my wiki today. Among other things I’ve fixed, it should now be set up to accept incoming webmentions. Hooray! I’ve always wanted an IndieWeb wiki to go with my IndieWeb website; it looks like I’m well on my way.

I’d looking into maintaining a wiki a while back and have recently been determined to get back to it. As a result, I’ve been looking at TiddlyWiki since that’s what some of Kicks Condor‘s group has been using. (Yep, I’ve still got that tab opened and am tinkering away slowly on the ideas–but mostly the technology.)

I’ve been having some issues in self-hosting a TiddlyWiki the way I’d like to. If anyone has any clear cut documentation on how to host a TiddlyWiki on one’s own domain name, I’d appreciate it. The documentation doesn’t seem as clear as I would expect (or perhaps more likely my server is having issues propagating/connecting?). If anything it’s muddled by the fact that they can seemingly be hosted in dozens of places one might not otherwise expect. My primary reservation is that it looks to me like they’re designed as single user instances, so I’m not exactly sure how Kicks et al. are effectuating their hyperconversations. Part of my issue is my mental model of some of the wikis involved in addition to the busy-ness of the sites’ themes, not to mention some of the non-standard conversational style on some. (I’ll get there eventually.)

I’ve also been using the IndieWeb’s MediaWiki for several years, so I’ve become much better at how it works as well as the ins-and-outs of the markup and how to do some slightly more advanced things using it. I’d set one up nearly a year ago this month and used it sporadically at best.

One of the bigger problems with my MediaWiki install was that somehow I wasn’t able to log into the primary account to do some of the necessary administrative functions. Today I got fed up with being hampered a bit and went spelunking into my install to see where things went wrong, suspecting that it was a one button install issue.

After digging through some documentation, I dug into the mySQL database and found a daunting looking [Blob] in the user_email field. Why couldn’t it be an easy-to-edit field? I not knowing anything better to do, I downloaded it, opened it up in my text editor, and discovered that I’d managed to leave a letter out of my own name in the email address! No wonder it wouldn’t work and the system wouldn’t let me reset my email address or password. A quick text edit later, the email was fixed, I uploaded the (now less intimidating) [Blob], and did a reset of the password in the admin interface, and we’re back in business! I’m always glad not to have borked the entire database and site.

Starting things is fun. Narrating things as you go is… funner.
Just about a month ago I joined the IndieWeb chat via Slack, which is connected to IRC and a web chat as well. I haven’t actually participated, but I’ve been getting the feel of conversations and checking out a bunch of the materia...

Congrats this is awesome!
Even doing the cutting/pasting from the wiki page to set up an event can sometimes be harrowing, so kudos for sticking with that part.

The part I got hung up on the most here was actually adding my name in the RSVP. The code seemed to suggest that adding would work, but it kept showing me “Template:Jeremyfelt.com” instead. I then poked around and saw that others had redirects setup, so I created a page titled “jeremyfelt” and added a wiki redirect to my user page and changed the code to , but it then said “Template:jeremyfelt” and I knew I was going nowhere. Finally, I updated it with standard URL syntax: [[jeremyfelt|Jeremy Felt]] and my name appeared as expected. No cool picture next to it or anything, but I’ll figure that at some point. This is all wiki stuff I probably used to know but have completely forgotten. ❧

With Alejandro Aranda, Jake Durkin, Caleb Lee Hutchinson, Eddie Island. Aspiring singers from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Louisville, Ky., and Los Angeles see if they have what it takes to earn a coveted golden ticket to Hollywood.

Watching passively while I’m setting up a few new websites, including a wiki and a Wallabag instance.

WordPress is the most popular blog software which can provide us opportunities to create beautiful and powerful websites. Mediawiki is also a very famous wiki software which can be applied to build our own knowledge pool like Wikipedia. Although some people may use WordPress to set up a small wiki system using plugins while others may use Mediawiki to blog their personal experiences, it cannot be more professional to use each of them to do things they are good at. Then the question comes as, is it possible to integrate them at the same time to make your website more functional?
The answer is absolutely YES! Just take hawkinqian.com as an example. I use WordPress and Mediawiki to serve as my personal blog system and wiki system respectively, and they both function pretty well and also integrates pretty well visually. That’s what I would like to talk about, the way to highly integrate WordPress and Mediawiki.

MediaWiki should not need any introduction to those of you who have been making Wikis online for a while now. There is no doubt that MediaWiki is a quite capable content management system for Wiki sites. It is not that hard to learn your way around it either. But integrating it with your WordPress site …